822 IMMANUELKANT
satisfied with any empirical use of the rules of the understanding, as being always
conditioned, requires a completion of this chain of conditions, then the understanding is
forced out of its sphere. And then it partly represents objects of experience in a series so
extended that no experience can grasp it; partly even (with a view to complete the
series) it seeks entirely beyond it noumena,to which it can attach that chain; and so,
having at last escaped from the conditions of experience, it makes its stand as it were
final. These are then the transcendental Ideas, which, in accord with the true but hidden
ends of the natural destiny of our reason, aim, not at extravagant concepts, but at an
unbounded extension of their empirical use, yet seduce the understanding by an
unavoidable illusion to a transcendent use, which, though deceitful, cannot be
restrained within the bounds of experience by any resolution, but only by scientific
instruction and with much difficulty.I. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IDEAS*
§ 46. People have long since observed that in all substances the subject proper,
that which remains after all the accidents (as predicates) are abstracted, consequently
the substantial,remains unknown, and various complaints have been made concerning
these limits to our knowledge. But it will be well to consider that the human under-
standing is not to be blamed for its inability to know the substance of things—that is, to
determine it by itself—but rather for demanding definitely to know substance, which is
a mere Idea, as though it were a given object. Pure reason requires us to seek for every
predicate of a thing its own subject, and for this subject, which is itself necessarily
nothing but a predicate, its subject, and so on indefinitely (or as far as we can reach).
But hence it follows that we must not hold anything at which we can arrive to be an
ultimate subject, and that substance itself never can be thought by our understanding,
however deep we may penetrate, even if all nature were unveiled to us. For the specific
nature of our understanding consists in thinking everything discursively, that is, by
concepts, and so by mere predicates, to which, therefore, the absolute subject must
always be wanting. Hence all the real properties by which we know bodies are mere
accidents—not excepting even impenetrability, which we can only represent to
ourselves as the effect of a power of which the subject is unknown to us.
Now we appear to have this substance in the consciousness of ourselves (in the
thinking subject), and indeed in an immediate intuition; for all the predicates of an
internal sense refer to the ego,as a subject, and I cannot conceive myself as the predi-
cate of any other subject. Hence completeness in the reference of the given concepts as
predicates to a subject—not merely an Idea, but an object—that is, the absolute subject
itself, seems to be given in experience. But this expectation is disappointed. For the ego
is not a concept,** but only the indication of the object of the inner sense, so far as we
know it by no further predicate. Consequently it cannot indeed be itself a predicate of
any other thing; but just as little can it be a definite concept of an absolute subject, but
is, as in all other cases, only the reference of the inner phenomena to their unknown
subject. Yet this idea (which serves very well as a regulative principle totally to destroy333
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*See Critique of Pure Reason,“The Paralogisms of Pure Reason.”
**Were the representation of the apperception (the Ego) a concept, by which anything whatever could
be thought, it could be used as a predicate of other things or contain predicates in itself. But it is nothing more
than the feeling of an existence without the least concept and is only the representation of that to which all
thinking stands in relation (relatione accidentis).